Traditionally, high pressure, high volume pumping applications use diesel reciprocating engines to drive a reciprocating pump. In the field of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, conventional diesel reciprocating engines have been replaced with turbine engines because the lower weight and easier deployment of turbine engines allow for improved speed of delivery, deployment, and uptime. As a result, pump system designs for hydraulic fracturing utilize a high speed take-off from a turbine engine (e.g., approaching 15000 RPM), through a gear reduction box, and into a reciprocating pump. The primary inefficiencies in such systems come from the gearbox (e.g., about 8% loss for an 8:1 gear reduction ratio) and the reciprocating pump (e.g., about 6% loss). As a result, the total loss in such systems from an output shaft of the engine to the total hydraulic horsepower is about 14%. In addition, while turbine engines provide an improvement over conventional diesel engines, the entire system, including the turbine engine, gearbox, and reciprocating pump still requires a relatively large footprint on a truck or trailer bed in mobile pumping applications.
Therefore, there is a need for a high efficiency, small footprint pump system for high pressure pumping applications.